Rose's Alpha Bakers: The Ischler

It's week three with Rose's Alpha Bakers and up this week is The Ischler. The Ischler is a light, flaky, almond cookie, traditionally made with a layer of both apricot lekvar and a thick chocolate ganache as the filling. I was in a time crunch this weekend (end of the semester paper time!) so I opted to just make the chocolate ganache filling. Next time I will make the apricot lekvar because the recipe looked delicious!

I think I'll call my cookie The Modified Ischler.

Yummalicious! A light nutty flavor, a very tender cookie, and chocolate. A win-win.

Rolled cookies are generally not my favorite to make...rolling...waiting...rolling...waiting. I'm too impatient! However, these cookies were pretty easy to make and I had them done in about 4 hours on Sunday morning.

The cookie itself tastes very similar to my all-time favorite Christmas cookies. If you like either making or just looking at pictures of gorgeous decorated cookies, I highly recommend the book Cookie Craft: From Baking to Luster Dust, Designs and Techniques for Creative Cookie Occasions.

powdered sugar and almonds are processed until fine

so far, so good, until...

opps...made a mistake and added the egg and vanilla before the butter...
It was early Sunday morning, I guess I was still half asleep!
Instead of trying to mix it, I just tossed in the butter and hoped for the best.
It came out fine in the end :)

flour is added and the dough is pulsed until it is crumbly and comes away from the bowl

I added a bit more flour here (about 2 T). The recipe says that the dough will be sticky, but mine was super sticky because I had a hard time measuring out 1/2 of an egg. Even with my scale, I couldn't get 22 grams perfectly, so I ended up using a bit more egg than was called for. This resulted in my dough being very wet, so I added a bit more flour to get it to form a ball in the above step.

the dough is divided into 4 parts, pressed between plastic wrap and then refrigerated...
I actually just rolled mine nearly all the way to save time later

after 2 hours of chilling, it gets a final roll and then it's ready to cut

a quick bake and they're done! They smell fantastic.

the cooled cookies and ingredients for my chocolate ganache

the chocolate pieces are melted and the hot cream is stirred in...
voila, smooth and silky ganache

so cute! I love the chocolate peeping out...

delicious! Light and flaky with a bit of chocolate.

Bye for now...